The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

by Cornelius Ryan

  Jessen-Schmidt nodded. “That’s the information I’ve received,” he said, “and I’ve no reason to doubt it.” The two men looked at each other in silence. For months they had been sustained by the conviction that Eisenhower’s forces would capture Berlin. But the news that had brought Jessen-Schmidt across town to Wiberg’s apartment had dashed all their hopes. A network courier had just arrived from Sweden with a message of prime importance from London. It warned them not to expect the Anglo-Americans.

  In all the long months that he had led his double life in Berlin, Wiberg had considered almost every possibility but this. Even now he could not quite believe it. The change in plan would not affect their jobs, at least for the time being: they were to continue sending out information, and Wiberg, in his role as “storekeeper,” would still distribute supplies to operatives when and if the order came. But as far as Wiberg knew, few, if any, of the trained specialists and saboteurs who were supposed to use the equipment had arrived in the city. Jessen-Schmidt had been waiting for weeks for just one man—a radio technician who was to assemble the transmitter and receiver that still lay hidden beneath a pile of coal in Wiberg’s cellar. With sinking heart Wiberg wondered if anybody would come now or if the equipment could ever be put to use. That cache of supplies was dangerous. The Germans might yet find it. Worse, the Russians might. Wiberg hoped London had told the Eastern allies about the little group of spies in Berlin. If not, the large store of military material was going to be difficult to explain.

  Wiberg also had a personal reason to be anxious. After his long years as a widower he had recently met a young woman named Inge Müller. They planned to marry when the war ended. Now Wiberg wondered how safe Inge would be if the Russians arrived. It seemed to him that the little group of conspirators was doomed in the fiery cauldron that Berlin would soon become. He tried to put aside his fears but he had never felt such dejection. They had been abandoned.

  The commander of the First Guards Tank Army, Colonel General mikhail Katukov, slammed down the field phone and, whirling around, violently kicked the door of his headquarters. He had just received a report from the officer leading the 65th Guards Tank Brigade on the Seelow Heights front. The Russians were getting nowhere. “We are standing on the heels of the infantry,” General Ivan Yushchuk had told Katukov. “We are stuck on our noses!”

  His anger somewhat appeased, Katukov turned from the door to face his staff. Hands on his hips, he shook his head in disbelief. “Those Hitlerite devils!” he said. “I have never seen such resistance in the whole course of the war.” Then Katukov announced that he was going to find out for himself “what the hell is holding things up.” No matter what, he must take the Heights by morning, so Zhukov’s breakout could begin.

  To the south. Marshal Koniev’s forces had smashed through the German defenses on an eighteen-mile front west of the Neisse. His troops were pouring across the river. They now had in operation twenty tank-carrying bridges (some capable of supporting sixty tons), twenty-one ferry and troop-crossing sites and seventeen light assault bridges. With “Stormovik” dive bombers blasting a path, Koniev’s tankers had driven more than ten miles through the enemy defenses in less than eight hours of battle. Now Koniev was just twenty-one miles from Lübben, the point at which Stalin had terminated the boundary between his forces and Zhukov’s. There, Koniev’s tankers would veer northwest and head for the main road leading through Zossen and into Berlin. On the maps this route was labeled Reichsstrasse 96—the highway that Field marshal Gerd von Rundstedt had called “Der Weg zur Ewigkeit”—the road to eternity.

  It almost seemed as if the authorities were not prepared to face the fact that Berlin was endangered. Although the Red Army was now barely thirty-two miles away, no alarm had been given and no official announcement had been made. Berliners knew very well that the Russians had attacked. The muffled thunder of artillery had been the first clue; now from refugees, by telephone, by word of mouth, the news had spread. But it was still fragmentary and contradictory, and in the absence of any real information there was wild speculation and rumor. Some people said the Russians were fewer than ten miles away, others heard that they were already in the eastern suburbs. No one knew precisely what the situation was, but most Berliners now believed that the city’s days were numbered, that its death throes had begun.

  And yet, astonishingly, people still went about their business. They were nervous, and it was increasingly difficult to preserve the outward appearance of normality, but everyone tried.

  At every stop, milkman Richard Poganowska was besieged with questions. His customers seemed to expect him to know more than anyone else. The usually cheerful Poganowska could not provide any answers. He was as fearful as those he served. On the Kreuznacherstrasse the portrait of Adolf Hitler still hung in the living room of the Nazi postal official, but even that no longer seemed reassuring to Poganowska.

  He was happy to see his young friend, 13-year-old Dodo marquardt, waiting patiently for him on a corner in Friedenau. She often rode with him for a block or two, and she helped immeasurably to keep up his morale. Now, sitting next to his dog Poldi, Dodo chattered happily. But Poganowska found it difficult to listen to her this morning. Some newly painted slogans had appeared on the half-demolished walls in the area, and he eyed them without enthusiasm. “Berlin will remain German,” one announced. Others read: “Victory or Slavery,” “Vienna Will Be German Again,” and “Who Believes in Hitler Believes in Victory.” At Dodo’s usual stop, Poganowska lifted her down from the wagon. With a little smile she said, “Until tomorrow, Mr. Milkman.” Poganowska replied, “Until tomorrow, Dodo.” As he climbed back on the wagon Richard Poganowska wondered just how many tomorrows there were left.

  Pastor Arthur Leckscheidt, presiding over a burial service in the cemetery near his wrecked church, did not think the suffering that lay ahead could be any worse than it was right now. It seemed an eternity since his beautiful Melanchthon Church had been destroyed. During the past few weeks so many had been killed in the raids that his parish clerk no longer registered the deaths. Leckscheidt stood at the edge of a mass grave in which lay the bodies of forty victims killed during the night’s air raids. Only a few persons were present as he said the funeral service. As he finished, most of them moved away but one young girl remained behind. She told Leckscheidt that her brother was one of the dead. Then tearfully she said: “He belonged to the SS. He was not a member of the church.” She hesitated. “Will you pray for him?” she asked. Leckscheidt nodded. Much as he disagreed with the Nazis and the SS, in death, he told her, he “could deny no man the words of God.” Bowing his head he said, “Lord, do not hide your face from me … my days have gone like a shadow … my life is like nothing before you … my time lies in your hands….” On a wall nearby, during the night somebody had scrawled the words “Germany is Victorious.”

  Mother Superior Cunegundes longed for the end of it all. Even though Haus Dahlem, the convent and maternity home run by the mission Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Wilmersdorf, was almost a little island in its religious seclusion, the short, round, energetic mother Superior was not without outside sources of information. The Dahlem Press Club, in the villa of Foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop directly across from the convent, had closed down the night before. From newspaper friends who had come to say good-bye she had heard that the end was near and that the battle for the city would take place within a few days. The resolute mother Superior hoped the fighting would not be prolonged. What with an allied plane crashing in her orchard and the roof of her convent being blown off a few days before, the danger was coming much too close. It was long past time for this foolish and terrible war to end. In the meantime, she had more than two hundred people to care for: 107 newborn babies (of whom 91 were illegitimate), 32 mothers, and 60 nuns and lay sisters.

  As though the Sisters did not have enough to do, mother Superior had piled even more work upon them. With the janitor’s help, some of the nuns had painted huge white circl
es surmounted by bright red crosses on the sides of the building and on the new tar paper roof which covered the entire second floor (the third floor had disappeared with the roof). Realist that she was, mother Superior had set her student nurses to converting the dining hall and recreation rooms into first-aid stations. The nurses’ dining hall had become the chapel, illuminated by candles night and day; the basement was now partitioned into nurseries and a series of smaller rooms for confinement cases. Mother Superior had even seen to it that all windows in this area were cemented, bricked up and sandbagged from the outside. She was as ready for what might come as she would ever be. But there was one thing she simply did not know how to prepare for: she shared the anxiety of their confessor and mentor, Father Bernhard Happich, that the women might be molested by the occupying forces. Father Happich had arranged to speak to the Sisters about this matter on April 23. Now, in the light of the news her journalist friends had brought, mother Superior Cunegundes hoped they hadn’t waited too long. It looked to her as if the Russians might arrive at any time.

  As people waited for news, they hid their anxiety in grim humor. A new greeting swept the city. Total strangers shook hands and urged each other “Bleib übrig”—Survive. Many Berliners were burlesquing Goebbels’ broadcast of ten days before. Insisting that Germany’s fortune would undergo a sudden change, he had said: “The Führer knows the exact hour of its arrival. Destiny has sent us this man so that we, in this time of great external and internal stress, shall testify to the miracle.” Now those words were being repeated everywhere, usually in a derisive imitation of the Propaganda minister’s spellbinding style. One other saying was going the rounds. “We’ve got nothing at all to worry about,” people solemnly assured one another. “Gröfaz will save us.” Gröfaz had long been the Berliner’s nickname for Hitler. It was the abbreviation of “Grösster Feldherr aller Zeiten”—the greatest general of all time.

  Even with the city almost under the Russian guns, the vast majority of Berlin’s industrial concerns were still producing. Shells and ammunition were being rushed to the front as fast as factories in Spandau could make them. Electrical equipment was being turned out at the Siemens plant in Siemensstadt; vast quantities of ballbearings and machine tools were being made in factories at Marienfelde, Weissensee and Erkner; gun barrels and mounts rolled out of the Rheinmetall-Borsig factory at Tegel; tanks, lorries and self-propelled guns rumbled off the assembly lines at Alkett in Ruhleben; and as fast as tanks were repaired at the Krupp und Druckenmüller plant in Tempelhof, workers delivered them directly to the armies. So great was the urgency that the management had even asked foreign workers to volunteer as emergency drivers. French forced laborer Jacques Delaunay was one who flatly refused. “You were very wise,” a tank driver who returned to the plant that afternoon told Delaunay. “Do you know where we took those tanks? Right up to the front lines.”

  Not only industrial plants but services and utilities continued to function. At the main meteorological station in Potsdam, weathermen noted routinely that the noontime temperature was 65 degrees with an expected drop to about 40 by nightfall. The sky was clear with occasional scattered clouds and there was a mild southwest wind which would swing southeast by evening. A change was predicted for the seventeenth—overcast skies with the possibility of thundershowers.

  Partly because of the fine weather, streets were crowded. Housewives, not knowing what the future might hold, shopped for unrationed commodities wherever they could. Every shop seemed to have its own long queue. In Köpenick, Robert and Hanna Schultze spent three hours in a line for bread. Who knew when they would be able to buy more? Like thousands of other Berliners, the Schultzes had tried to find some way to forget their worries. On this day, braving the now capricious transportation system, they changed buses and trams six times to get to their Charlottenburg destination—a movie theater. It was their third such venture in a week. In various districts they had seen pictures called Ein Mann wie Maximilian (A man Like Maximilian); Engel mit dem Saitenspiel (Angel with a Lyre) and Die Grosse Nummer (The Big Number). Die Grosse Nummer was a circus picture, and Robert thought it the best of the week’s film fare by far.

  French POW Raymond Legathière saw that there was so much confusion at the military headquarters on Bendlerstrasse that his presence would not be missed and he calmly took the afternoon off. These days, the guards did not seem to care anyway. Legathière had managed to wrangle a ticket for a movie theater near the Potsdamer Platz that was reserved for German soldiers. Now he relaxed in the darkness as the picture, specially reissued by Goebbels’ Propaganda ministry, came on. It was a historical full-color epic called Kolberg, and it dealt with Graf von Gneisenau’s heroic defense of the Pomeranian city during the Napoleonic Wars. During the movie Legathière was as fascinated by the behavior of the soldiers around him as he was by the picture. They were enthralled. Cheering, clapping, exclaiming to one another, they were almost transported by this saga of one of Germany’s legendary military figures. It occured to Legathière that before too long some of these soldiers might get a chance to become heroes themselves.

  The signal came without warning. In his office in the Philharmonic, the complex of buildings that housed the concert halls and practice studios of the Berlin Philharmonic, Dr. Gerhart von Westermann, the orchestra’s manager, received a message from Reichsminister Albert Speer: the Philharmonic would play its last concert that evening.

  Von Westermann had always known that the news would come like this—suddenly and within just a few hours of a concert. Speer’s instructions were that all the musicians who would leave were to do so immediately after the performance. They were to end their journey in the Kulmbach-Bayreuth region, about 240 miles southwest of Berlin—the same area to which Speer had earlier sent most of the Philharmonic’s prized instruments. According to the Reichsminister, the Americans would overrun the Bayreuth area in a matter of hours.

  There was just one trouble. Speer’s original design had been to spirit away the entire Philharmonic; this plan had collapsed. To begin with, fearing that the plan might reach Goebbels’ ear, Von Westermann had sounded out only certain trusted members of the orchestra. To his amazement the great majority, because of family, sentimental or other ties with the city, were reluctant to leave. When the plan was put to a vote it was turned down. Gerhard Taschner, the young violin virtuoso and concertmaster, was asked to inform Speer. The Reichsminister had taken the news philosophically, but the offer was left open: Speer’s own car and driver would be waiting on the final night to take those who wanted to go. Taschner, his wife and two children, along with the daughter of fellow musician Georg Diburtz, were definitely leaving. But they were the only ones. Even Von Westermann, in view of the vote, felt that he must stay.

  But if there were any wavering Philharmonic members, they would have to be told that this was their last chance. There was still a possibility that those who were in on the secret might change their minds and decide to leave. So, with the evening’s performance barely three hours away, Von Westermann revised the program. It was too late even to schedule a rehearsal, and the musicians who knew nothing of the evacuation plan would be startled by the change. But for the knowing and unknowing alike, the music Speer had picked as the signal marking the last concert would have a dark and moving significance. The scores that Von Westermann now ordered placed on the musicians’ stands bore the label, Die Götterdämmerung—Wagner’s climactic and tragic music of the death of the gods.

  By now it was fast becoming clear to all Berliners that “Fortress Berlin” was a myth; even the least knowledgeable could see how ill-prepared the city was to withstand an attack. The main roads and highways were still open. There were few guns or armored vehicles in evidence, and apart from aged Home Guardsmen, some in uniform, others with only armbands sewn on the sleeves of their jackets, there were virtually no troops to be seen.

  To be sure, there were roadblocks and crude defense barriers everywhere. In side streets, courtyards, aroun
d government buildings and in parks, large stockpiles of fortification materials had been collected. There were occasional rolls of barbed wire, masses of steel anti-tank obstacles and old trucks and disused tram cars filled with stones. These were to be used to block main thoroughfares when the city came under attack. But would barricades such as these stop the Russians? “It will take the Reds at least two hours and fifteen minutes to break through,” a current joke went: “Two hours laughing their heads off and fifteen minutes smashing the barricades.” Defense lines—trenches, anti-tank ditches, barricades and gun positions—were apparent only on the outskirts, and even these, as Berliners could plainly see, were far from completion.

  One man, driving out of the city this day, found the defense preparations “utterly futile, ridiculous!” He was an expert on fortifications. General max Pemsel had been the Chief of Staff of the Seventh Army defending Normandy on D-Day. Because his forces had failed to stop the invasion, Pemsel, along with others, had been in disgrace with Hitler ever since. He had been put in command of an obscure division fighting in the north and had resigned himself to this “dead command.”

  Then on April 2 a surprised Pemsel had received instructions from General Jodl to fly to Berlin. Bad weather had delayed his planes everywhere and he had not reached the capital until April 12. Jodl had admonished him for his tardiness. “You know, Pemsel,” he said, “you were supposed to be appointed commander of Berlin, but you’ve arrived too late.” As he heard these words, Pemsel said later, “a large stone fell off my heart.”

  Now, instead of taking over the Berlin command, Pemsel was en route to the Italian front: Jodl had appointed him Chief of Staff to marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s Italian Army. Pemsel found the situation almost dreamlike. He considered it doubtful that Graziani’s force still existed; nevertheless, Jodl had briefed him on his duties as thoroughly as though the war were proving a brilliant success and were destined to go on for years. “Your job,” he cautioned Pemsel, “will be very difficult because it demands not only great military knowledge but diplomatic skills.” Unrealistic as Jodl’s outlook was, Pemsel was pleased to be going to Italy. On the way he would pass through Bavaria, and for the first time in two years he would see his wife and family. By the time he reached Italy, perhaps the war would be over.